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Comment by pxtail | Hacker News Reader

I'm amazed and amused reading some replies - it looks like some people would love to live in a world where single corporation fulfills all their basic needs:

* restaurants from amazon

* home real estate market[0]

* shopping from amazon

* entertainment from amazon

* alexa from amazon, listening all the time

* education (already some basic form of it exists - alexa is used to answer kids questions)

Although many important key services are still missing: healthcare, insurances, banking.. etc.

edit: banking-related product already out [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20152956

[1] Banking - Amazon.com Credit Builder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20149304

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There is perhaps an appeal to megacorps as voluntary nation-state membership; it is not trivial to leave one's tech ecosystem, but it's much easier than leaving one's nation, and there are advantages to all the components of the stack working together. (Blood and souls for my Lord Apple of Cupertino!)

On the other hand, I think Douglas Rushkoff and Bruce Schneier are correct in comparing the FAANG ecosystem to feudalism: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2012/11/when_it_com...

I haven't used the restaurant service, but I'm starting to be shocked at how quickly Amazon is going downhill in most of their consumer-facing businesses. I dropped prime last month after maybe 6 years, since the price keeps climbing and the value of the service keeps dropping. I used to make nearly all of my online purchases through them, but between the fakes and poor customer service I couldn't justify the cost of prime anymore.

Although I think this is a good thing, I'd rather not see one company control the entirety of e-commerce. And out of the big tech companies Amazon is the easiest to drop (excluding AWS, strictly consumer services). I'm still not Google-free, but switching email and search was much more difficult than leaving Amazon.

I want someone to come in and crush entrenched rent-seekers by building and scaling better, cheaper products. There are only a handful of companies in recent memory that have managed to do that - Walmart, Vanguard, Uber/Lyft, and arguably Airbnb and Robinhood are the first few that come to mind - and I can't think of any other than Amazon that have done it in multiple spaces (CPG + IaaS so far).

I'd prefer if different startups did it in each of those industries, but I can live with Amazon taking over the world if it means that health care no longer sucks and selling a home no longer costs 6% and kids in underfunded school districts get their questions answered.

You can sell your home though various portals without having to ever speak to a realtor. Walmart has innovated in a few different places but primarily logistics. Disney is not just an animation hub, they work on robotics, software, as well as psychology and other areas. I think it's easier to see when your company isn't already a behemoth. Amazon arguably has done innovation better than most, but a lot of that has been through investor money other people wouldn't have access to. Established companies have to balance the books and as they've shifted towards profitability and revenue innovation has necessarily slowed.

I think you're already seeing many of your problems getting closer to solutions. There is that natural tension though between capitalism and it's tendency towards monopoly and the government's responsibility to ensure that the market stays healthy and competitive.

> healthcare

Forget about Haven already?

Keep in mind feudalism, though far from ideal, had benefits.

Good lord if Haven can fix the broken US healthcare system, I'd happily embrace the feudal estate.

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